There’s a lot to talk about with the challenges we’ve had. Weather always plays a role. The politics we’ve been encountering, especially with the trade war and small refinery exemptions, those have really had a negative impact on our markets. Weather would typically provide a bullish scenario in a lot of instances, but government policies have taken that away and moved us more to the downside. When we get these crops harvested, we have to go back and rely on the demand we’ve created over…

It looks like this week is going to be OK. I got my corn wrapped up last week so I’ve been working on tillage. That’s a challenge since everything is muddy. You have to pick the right times to go out. It doesn’t sound like the gas situation is improving at all. That continues to be a frustration. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel on that.

We are bouncing between harvest and tillage. Guys up here are waiting on LP to keep things going. It’s been a bit of a grind. I think there are even local elevators running out of LP too. There’s frustration galore up here in northeast Iowa. The ground is freezing now, but hopefully we have the opportunity to get some tillage done. Corn moisture is around 19% in the stuff I’ve been in.

Things are going OK. We had a few weather events slow us down with snow and rain, but we ran a bit over the weekend. We tried to wait for some corn to get a little dryer, but we didn’t gain a lot on that front. We are at about 19-20%, so hopefully we have a good week. Temperatures are supposed to drop substantially during the week.

A lot of guys were able to get finished up with beans this past weekend around here. I started on corn myself Thursday or Friday and ran hard on that over the weekend. My moisture levels are 21 to 23 — I’ve heard of people with 25-27. Not as wet as some of us anticipated. Yields are above expectations — a surprise to the upside certainly. The early planted corn is good.

We had a good week last week. Throughout last week, I was able to get my beans done. Some guys even got going on corn. There’s still a few beans out there, but last week was the week we were waiting for. Yields ran from mid-50s to high-60s, so it was pretty variable, for no rhyme or reason it seemed. I thought some beans looked like they were going to be better than they turned out to be, but it wasn’t quite there in my case.

I’m hoping to get started on beans again (Oct. 14). We didn’t do anything over the weekend with the rain we had. Hopefully we have a good week this week to give us a chance to pound a lot of the beans out. We are getting to the middle of October and the days are getting shorter, so the window gets a little tighter from here on out.

The only thing I have to report is that I received about 5 inches of rain last week, Wednesday through Saturday. I tried a few beans on Monday (Sept. 30), but they were 16%, they just weren’t dry enough. I’ve only combined one day, and that was a week and a half ago.